News from Think Again

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Here's the news from Think Again.... 

"At the end of exactly one week of the course, the total number of active users during that week was recorded at a whopping 86,050. I believe that this is a new record both for the highest total active users and possibly also for the highest activity percentage among registered users (then 171,719) in Coursera history."


!!!!!  I mean!  Goodness.  171,719 is bigger than the population of Ann Arbor (even including the students, I think).  Amazing.

Coursera's got some work to do.  There are a number of things they could fix that would make our (students') lives easier.

• When they send us email, letting us know there is a new message in a thread we are following in the discussion fora, they could give us a link to the exact message.  A link to the top of a very busy (pages and pages of comments!) thread is not very useful.
• They could give us a "within thread" search.
• There could be human intervention when new threads are created.  It's hard enough to keep track of one enormous thread, but when there are multiple threads on the same topic -- forget it!  (Coursera may provide for this, and the people running the class have to use it; I don't know.)

I am sure Coursera had no idea they were going to get these sorts of numbers, so quickly, and they're clearly not ready to handle it neatly.

It's exciting to be in on the ground floor of something new, but being the guinea pig as the bugs are worked out would not be my first choice.

Nevertheless, I'm glad to be here.  There.  Involved.  (lol......)



Ok.  I am off to learn/practice "close analysis" by looking carefully at Robert Redford's Washington Post op ed piece on the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

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